Trouble the Water. 2008. USA. Directed by Tia Lessin, Carl Deal. DCP. 96 min.
Beyond the 24-hour news coverage of 9/11, but before the first-person citizen journalism enabled by cell phones and social media became ubiquitous, there was Hurricane Katrina, a disaster whose cultural legacy is inseparable from our desire to document it, in everything from homemade camcorder footage, to victim outcries on the news, to the harrowing helicopter images of stranded survivors being rescued from their rooftops that were immediately burned into the nation’s consciousness.
Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water combines on-the-ground footage leading up to and during the hurricane with the filmmakers’ effort to document the experience of one family in the storm’s aftermath. The homemade footage comes courtesy of Lower 9th Ward residents Scott and Kimberly Rivers Roberts, Hurricane survivors who quickly became refugees. Combining interviews, neighborhood tours, and the Robertses’ vérité footage, Trouble the Water offers one of the few, and among the most pointed, first-person documents of the atrocity: a story detailing everything from hapless military nonintervention and refugees’ efforts to secure stable housing and FEMA compensation, to the outright destruction of a poor Black community as experienced by the community itself.